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> nobody really seems to care about locking you out of your own (non-mobile) device The "non-mobile" caveat is doing a lot of work in 2022. >90% of computer ti

> nobody really seems to care about locking you out of your own (non-mobile) device The "non-mobile" caveat is doing a lot of work in 2022. >90% of computer time is on mobile devices. > I ask that you care about republicans banning actual physical books from schools as least as much This seems like a total non-sequitur. Why do you bring this up? In any case, the last 3-4 times I looked into one of these cases, the "ban" was actually just removing the book from the mandatory curriculum. There are also some at-least-as-severe "bans" from the left, like removing Huckleberry Finn due to racial designators that are considered offensive. The pressure to ban these books does not come from republicans.

_cenw 4y ago
this comment was about Pluton. Mobile is an entirely different beast. But that aside, the extent of the "lockdown" outside of recent Huawei shenanigans always seems to be limited to which corporations can put their services on a device under which rules. Not which books you can read.
- Jenda_ 4y ago
  > Mobile is an entirely different beast. Why would desktop vendors not follow the same pathway? To me, it looks like it is only a "tradition" (desktop computers are from an era when it was deemed normal to tinker with your OS) and the paradigm can shift.
  - _cenw 4y ago
    Because it is extremely disruptive to the entire platform? Windows has been keeping decades old APIs on life support for the sake of business customers. This would quite literally be the opposite move. These two ecosystems have not converged in the past 20+ years, why would they now? Also, somehow most Android vendors still provide bootloader unlock keys.
  - PhasmaFelis 4y ago
    They're very different markets with very different needs. The market share of PCs will fall, relative to phones, but never vanish, and as it falls the casual users will leave, leaving an even greater concentration of tinkerers. There are hundreds of millions of passionate hobbyists of various types who use PCs specifically because of their deep versatility, including all of the nascent coders that the big corps depend on for their next generation of dev hires. Abandoning them would be like automakers abandoning the transport truck market because it's not as big as the family car market. They would lose a bunch of money, and money is the bottom line.
    - Jenda_ 4y ago
      You are right that the business depending on the "tradition" is way bigger than I anticipated. > There are hundreds of millions of passionate hobbyists of various types who use PCs specifically because of their deep versatility I think there would be lots of hobbyists tinkering with smartphones… > including all of the nascent coders that the big corps depend on for their next generation of dev hires This is something I sometimes worry about: I think most of current developers/sysadmins/hackers started by tinkering with their computer, playing with snippets of HTML/Python/shell, and therefore we will get much less coders in the near future, as kids are moving to devices which do not allow such easy tinkering? (yes, I know there are smartphone apps that provide some functionality, but I think it's generally less accessible)
CharlesW 4y ago
> >90% of computer time is on mobile devices. But >90% of that time is used for consumption and communication, in which case an appliance that prioritizes security over hackability is the right answer for non-technical people. In the relatively few cases where a mobile general-purpose computer is necessary, there are many suitable mobile devices — laptops, rooted tablets, Linux phones, etc.
alkonaut 4y ago
> The "non-mobile" caveat is doing a lot of work in 2022. >90% of computer time is on mobile devices. Sure. But I don’t feel robbed of the ability to do general purpose computing so long as my device for general purpose computing allows me to do general purpose computing. Even if my locked down phone stays locked down. I want my phone to be a locked down appliance and I bought it because it’s a locked down appliance, not despite that it was. The question is perhaps: is it a problem that we have 2 classes of devices (mostly open like PCs, and mostly closed like everything else from consoles to phones cars), and that we need the first kind less and less? That’s certainly happening. But for me to consider something a war on general purpose computing I’d need to see actual attacks on my ability to use my general purpose computing devices. Not merely that I’m given more options to use other devices.
- saurik 4y ago
  The vast majority of people do not buy devices because they are locked down. In fact the idea that someone buys a phone because it is locked down and not because it fits in their pockets and has a radio on it is so disingenuous as to defy the intelligence of the reader. You only ever see that take on Hacker News (or similar tech forums) where people who are vested into this world defend their decisions. On the contrary--and I can say this with some air of authority--normal people bristle at restrictions they run into and when given the opportunity to escape those restrictions do so in large numbers. Despite the ridiculous amount of complication and even risk involved with jailbreaking one's phone, we had something like 12% of people with an iPhone jailbreaking them at some point (and, no: it had little to do with piracy, and even the United States Copyright Office agreed with that: people wanted functionality that wasn't being provided). The reality is: people at best buy these devices without understanding that they are locked down or at worst despite them being locked down. The business model of selling a locked down device is just so enticing that it has become hard to find devices that maintain high quality that aren't locked down, particularly at low price points. The only reason there seem to exist any anymore is because there are a handful of people at Google--and specifically Google--who have decided to defend the world from this fate. And even they aren't perfect. Virtually the entire category of ultrabooks seems to have fallen to Chromebooks, and I seriously had to sit around for an hour soldering to create a special magic USB debugging serial bypass cable that I use to essentially jailbreak these things so I can run actual-Linux on them. And that's really what is going to be your fate: the concept of a general purpose laptop is going to slowly die off and you are going to find yourself with fewer and fewer options that cost an arm and a leg vs. the ridiculously cheap alternative devices that will start to have better hardware or different design tradeoffs and you are also going to switch. The mere existence that "sure, I can still spend a small fortune to obtain a general purpose computer" doesn't somehow prevent our fate, particularly given that these arguments tend to come from anti-DRM "nut jobs" like Cory and I who will point out that your general purpose computer is cool and all but if it isn't allowed to connect to the same networks or busses (think HDMCP) as the locked down devices then we are still losing something important: we aren't claiming you won't be able to build a computer, only that it won't be useful anymore :(.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
fsflover 4y ago
> The "non-mobile" caveat is doing a lot of work in 2022. >90% of computer time is on mobile devices. Which is why I'm supporting GNU/Linux phones, Librem 5 and Pinephone.
_cenw 4y ago
> Why do you bring this up? One, because it is a much more immediate issue than hypothetical digital access restrictions to the "wrong" books. These books are being made unavailable right now. Two, because the FSF/GNU, as usual, has a huge blind spot for who they should advocate for. They always seem less concerned with a wide range of people having access to books or code (i.e. the supposed 90% of smartphone users) and more with _them_ (on a decade old libreboot laptop running linux-libre - something only a very dedicated individual will build or comission and accept the inconveniences of) having access to books. The book bans in, for instance, Texas are much more easy to circumvent, but affect many more people. Suppressing access to queer literature (for instance) for 80% of the population right now is much more dangerous than a hypothetical technology that could censor 99% tomorrow. Those 19% are probably not even worth chasing, because you already convinced a majority that this material doesn't exist. > In any case, the last 3-4 times I looked into one of these cases, the "ban" was actually just removing the book from the mandatory curriculum. "especially on those from historically marginalized backgrounds who are watching their library shelves emptied" https://pen.org/report/banned-usa-growing-movement-to-censor-books-in-schools/ https://pen.org/report/banned-usa-growing-movement-to-censor...

_cenw 4y ago

this comment was about Pluton. Mobile is an entirely different beast. But that aside, the extent of the "lockdown" outside of recent Huawei shenanigans always seems to be limited to which corporations can put their services on a device under which rules. Not which books you can read.

Jenda_ 4y ago
> Mobile is an entirely different beast. Why would desktop vendors not follow the same pathway? To me, it looks like it is only a "tradition" (desktop computers are from an era when it was deemed normal to tinker with your OS) and the paradigm can shift.
- _cenw 4y ago
  Because it is extremely disruptive to the entire platform? Windows has been keeping decades old APIs on life support for the sake of business customers. This would quite literally be the opposite move. These two ecosystems have not converged in the past 20+ years, why would they now? Also, somehow most Android vendors still provide bootloader unlock keys.
- PhasmaFelis 4y ago
  They're very different markets with very different needs. The market share of PCs will fall, relative to phones, but never vanish, and as it falls the casual users will leave, leaving an even greater concentration of tinkerers. There are hundreds of millions of passionate hobbyists of various types who use PCs specifically because of their deep versatility, including all of the nascent coders that the big corps depend on for their next generation of dev hires. Abandoning them would be like automakers abandoning the transport truck market because it's not as big as the family car market. They would lose a bunch of money, and money is the bottom line.
  - Jenda_ 4y ago
    You are right that the business depending on the "tradition" is way bigger than I anticipated. > There are hundreds of millions of passionate hobbyists of various types who use PCs specifically because of their deep versatility I think there would be lots of hobbyists tinkering with smartphones… > including all of the nascent coders that the big corps depend on for their next generation of dev hires This is something I sometimes worry about: I think most of current developers/sysadmins/hackers started by tinkering with their computer, playing with snippets of HTML/Python/shell, and therefore we will get much less coders in the near future, as kids are moving to devices which do not allow such easy tinkering? (yes, I know there are smartphone apps that provide some functionality, but I think it's generally less accessible)

CharlesW 4y ago

> >90% of computer time is on mobile devices. But >90% of that time is used for consumption and communication, in which case an appliance that prioritizes security over hackability is the right answer for non-technical people. In the relatively few cases where a mobile general-purpose computer is necessary, there are many suitable mobile devices — laptops, rooted tablets, Linux phones, etc.

alkonaut 4y ago

> The "non-mobile" caveat is doing a lot of work in 2022. >90% of computer time is on mobile devices. Sure. But I don’t feel robbed of the ability to do general purpose computing so long as my device for general purpose computing allows me to do general purpose computing. Even if my locked down phone stays locked down. I want my phone to be a locked down appliance and I bought it because it’s a locked down appliance, not despite that it was. The question is perhaps: is it a problem that we have 2 classes of devices (mostly open like PCs, and mostly closed like everything else from consoles to phones cars), and that we need the first kind less and less? That’s certainly happening. But for me to consider something a war on general purpose computing I’d need to see actual attacks on my ability to use my general purpose computing devices. Not merely that I’m given more options to use other devices.

saurik 4y ago
The vast majority of people do not buy devices because they are locked down. In fact the idea that someone buys a phone because it is locked down and not because it fits in their pockets and has a radio on it is so disingenuous as to defy the intelligence of the reader. You only ever see that take on Hacker News (or similar tech forums) where people who are vested into this world defend their decisions. On the contrary--and I can say this with some air of authority--normal people bristle at restrictions they run into and when given the opportunity to escape those restrictions do so in large numbers. Despite the ridiculous amount of complication and even risk involved with jailbreaking one's phone, we had something like 12% of people with an iPhone jailbreaking them at some point (and, no: it had little to do with piracy, and even the United States Copyright Office agreed with that: people wanted functionality that wasn't being provided). The reality is: people at best buy these devices without understanding that they are locked down or at worst despite them being locked down. The business model of selling a locked down device is just so enticing that it has become hard to find devices that maintain high quality that aren't locked down, particularly at low price points. The only reason there seem to exist any anymore is because there are a handful of people at Google--and specifically Google--who have decided to defend the world from this fate. And even they aren't perfect. Virtually the entire category of ultrabooks seems to have fallen to Chromebooks, and I seriously had to sit around for an hour soldering to create a special magic USB debugging serial bypass cable that I use to essentially jailbreak these things so I can run actual-Linux on them. And that's really what is going to be your fate: the concept of a general purpose laptop is going to slowly die off and you are going to find yourself with fewer and fewer options that cost an arm and a leg vs. the ridiculously cheap alternative devices that will start to have better hardware or different design tradeoffs and you are also going to switch. The mere existence that "sure, I can still spend a small fortune to obtain a general purpose computer" doesn't somehow prevent our fate, particularly given that these arguments tend to come from anti-DRM "nut jobs" like Cory and I who will point out that your general purpose computer is cool and all but if it isn't allowed to connect to the same networks or busses (think HDMCP) as the locked down devices then we are still losing something important: we aren't claiming you won't be able to build a computer, only that it won't be useful anymore :(.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

fsflover 4y ago

> The "non-mobile" caveat is doing a lot of work in 2022. >90% of computer time is on mobile devices. Which is why I'm supporting GNU/Linux phones, Librem 5 and Pinephone.

_cenw 4y ago

> Why do you bring this up? One, because it is a much more immediate issue than hypothetical digital access restrictions to the "wrong" books. These books are being made unavailable right now. Two, because the FSF/GNU, as usual, has a huge blind spot for who they should advocate for. They always seem less concerned with a wide range of people having access to books or code (i.e. the supposed 90% of smartphone users) and more with _them_ (on a decade old libreboot laptop running linux-libre - something only a very dedicated individual will build or comission and accept the inconveniences of) having access to books. The book bans in, for instance, Texas are much more easy to circumvent, but affect many more people. Suppressing access to queer literature (for instance) for 80% of the population right now is much more dangerous than a hypothetical technology that could censor 99% tomorrow. Those 19% are probably not even worth chasing, because you already convinced a majority that this material doesn't exist. > In any case, the last 3-4 times I looked into one of these cases, the "ban" was actually just removing the book from the mandatory curriculum. "especially on those from historically marginalized backgrounds who are watching their library shelves emptied" https://pen.org/report/banned-usa-growing-movement-to-censor-books-in-schools/ https://pen.org/report/banned-usa-growing-movement-to-censor...